


The Fourth Head of the Dragon

by Miss_M



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dark, F/M, Post-Canon, Trials, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-09
Updated: 2014-10-09
Packaged: 2018-02-20 10:50:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2426045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a war, there come tribunals. What if the first meeting between Jaime Lannister and Brienne of Tarth took place in a dungeon – with the Kingslayer about to stand trial and the Maid of Tarth as the government representative charged with recording his confession?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fourth Head of the Dragon

**Author's Note:**

> This came out of my wondering how Jaime may have broken bad had Brienne not been there when he lost his hand, had he not had his memories of her to help him through everything that came after. And how Brienne’s experiences of war could have broken her differently than she gets broken in canon, without her acquaintance with Jaime to show her people can do better than before. I own nothing.

Although she had served the Dragon Queen as a conciliator for upwards of two years already, Brienne of Tarth could not get used to her title. It did not sit right with Brienne to be called Conciliator Tarth by her fellow conciliators, the maesters who helped her find the chronicles, letters, and dispatches she used to compose the accused men and women’s official histories, or the few acquaintances she had made in the Red Keep. The title did not, Brienne had come to realize, have much to do with actual conciliation. This made the syllables sit jagged and painful in Brienne’s mouth, made them sound like clanging, hollow metal when others addressed her, a soup ladle striking a kettle rather than swords clashing. 

Conciliator. One who conciliates, reconciles. 

Daenerys Targaryen’s small council had come up with reassuring new words, the better to soothe a realm still raw with years of war. Instead of ‘Fire and Blood,’ the three heads of the Targaryen dragon now corresponded to the three promises the Dragon Queen extended to her subjects: Justice, Mercy, Peace. 

Gentle promises with fangs and claws and fiery breath. Brienne noticed that peace came third, the queen’s justice first. 

Not that the queen could not be just and merciful. She certainly had restored peace, by fire and sword and rivers of blood. The North was a depopulated wasteland, they said, where not even wights roamed any more, the Riverlands sown thick with lesser Harrenhals, after they’d been scoured by marauding armies for years beforehand. Brienne had spent much of the first part of the war in the Riverlands, had seen and felt the war on her own skin. Perhaps reducing it all to bones buried in ash was the best choice, Brienne thought sometimes when Spring rains in King’s Landing made her thrice-broken leg ache and damp seeped into her clothes, clinging to her skin till the old scourge marks on her back itched. 

Justice, Mercy, Peace. 

Retribution went unspoken, loomed like a shadow behind the three golden principles. The fourth head of the dragon, the deadliest, and the most necessary. 

The Queen’s Tribunals were winding down their set task, like windmills at Winter’s end. In the first moons after the Restoration, conciliators and judges had worked night and day to purge all enemies of the Targaryen name. Now, over two years into Queen Daenerys’ reign, the mill stones ground more and more slowly, only a trickle of the accused still left. Among them, but a few large grains remained, which would have to be crushed and sifted with special care. A final example made to lords and smallfolk alike before the tribunals closed for good, and justice, mercy, and peace could be imposed without constant reminders of what happened to those who persisted in their defiance: heads on spikes, their personal histories read out by town criers, their crimes made the stuff of market-day gossip across the realm. Daenerys I was clever enough to understand the threat of fire and blood would be much more effective if she made an example of scores of her enemies beforehand. 

Brienne sometimes wondered if it would ever be enough. Could the Dragon Queen ever truly rule with a gentle hand after she had started her reign with blood up to her lily-white elbows? 

Brienne knew better than to consider herself an authority on such matters. Many years had passed since she’d believed in purity, good intentions, the unsullied nature of her youthful ideals. She had been bent and broken, and in turn she’d broken every vow and principle she had ever held dear. Now she could manage only to get out of bed every morning, do her work to the best of her ability, and try not to think of where she would go and what she would do once she was no longer needed in the capital. Her father might be glad to have her back, but Brienne could not think of Tarth with its pure blue waters and its crystal waterfalls and the Evenfall Hall of her memory, resounding with laughter and songs of an evening, without feeling as though her bowels were loaded with stones. 

When Chief Conciliator Qyburn summoned Brienne to his chamber of office and informed her that she would compose the official history of Jaime Lannister the Kingslayer, Brienne reflected that the girl she had been some ten years earlier would have felt tongue-tied and knock-kneed before such a task. For the woman she had become, the woman the war had forged, her main concern was the work this would require before the Kingslayer was due to stand trial. 

His would be the last trial the Queen’s Tribunals would undertake. The last execution. Jaime Lannister’s tarred head on a spike would be the crowning jewel of the Targaryen Restoration. Let it never be said the Dragon Queen lacked a sense of drama. 

“Will I be assigned an assistant?” Brienne asked the grey-haired man seated comfortably behind a broad oaken table. He kept her standing, despite her leg. “Or a scribe, at least? The Kingslayer’s personal history might turn out quite long.”

Qyburn gave her a look more shrewd than kind. Many rumors swirled down the Red Keep’s corridors about his past, none spoken above a whisper. A man said to have once ridden with outlaws and served the Lannister Pretenders, who’d yet managed to worm his way into a position of necessity, if not quite trust, with the Dragon Queen, was clearly a man who knew the book of survival cover to cover and would allow no one to survive at his expense. Brienne had never developed a taste for politics but she could understand the desire to endure, however much she wished she did not, that she had never learned the lingering bitterness of compromise. 

“Were we to write the Kingslayer’s actual history,” Qyburn said in his soft, affable way, “it would be a task for many conciliators and scribes working tirelessly over many moons. Alas, we cannot afford such luxury. The Kingslayer will stand trial within the fortnight. You will only meet with him thrice. Her Grace does not require a detailed personal history, only a simple confession. A tally of the Kingslayer’s crimes, in his own words, to be developed and embellished by the good maesters of the Citadel at some future point.”

Brienne frowned. This was novel, and she misliked it. The composing of the accused’s personal history was a painstaking process meant to dispel rumor and establish the truth once and for all. Qyburn’s words smacked of politics and expediency and everything the Queen’s Tribunals were not meant to represent. Even though the tribunals often failed to live up to their reputation for scrupulous attention to detail and veracity, which Brienne knew well. 

“This is why I am entrusting you with the task, Brienne. You will not get bogged down in details or allow the Kingslayer to charm and mislead you.” 

The smile the Chief Conciliator gave her was warm as fresh bread, utterly sincere. It made Brienne feel like snails were crawling over her hands. Yet she had learned long ago that few battles were truly worth fighting, so she bowed her head in assent and went to consult the chronicles she would need to prepare herself for her first meeting with the Kingslayer. 

Brienne had never seen the man before, though she had heard the stories, same as everyone. When the guards admitted her into the windowless chamber one level above the black cells, where she had spoken to many an accused in the past, she wondered if those stories were affecting her senses. 

The Kingslayer was well on the other side of forty, missing his sword hand and hollow-cheeked, with more silver than gold in his hair and beard, yet even after moons spent in the black cells, even with everything Brienne knew he was guilty of, there was no denying the beauty or the power of the man. 

He looked her up and down when she entered, so Brienne felt thankful she was no longer a foolish young thing. 

“I am Conciliator Brienne of Tarth,” she said formally as she seated herself across from him, laying her notes, clean parchment, and inkwell on the table between them. “I have been charged with the compilation of your confession.” 

“Tarth,” Jaime Lannister said, rolling the word on his tongue like an interesting morsel of some hitherto untasted dish. “Tarth. I’ve heard of you. The wench who would be a knight. You were one of Renly’s, weren’t you?” 

Brienne did not react. Others had attempted to discompose her with such questions in the past. When a man or a woman knew their trial was a mere formality, a headsman’s sword their future, their pride in a game of words well played and won was often the only thing which remained. 

“And now here you are, a conciliator for the Targaryens.” The Kingslayer smiled with what looked like genuine pleasure. “How amusing. You must tell me how you contrived it, wench, perhaps I might find inspiration in your feats of cloak-turning.” 

Brienne ground her jagged teeth. “Your time grows brief, ser. Her Grace will have a confession out of you. It will be a true confession, given freely and without duress…” 

“And then I will repeat it in front of one of her little tribunals,” he interrupted, “before they snick my head off, all done freely and without duress. From the look of all those pages covered in your awful handwriting, you already know everything you think I’ve done. Go ahead, wench: read out the charges, and I’ll yay or nay, the sooner to have this finished. I would rather spend my last days in the dark than look at your ugly face.” 

His insults were wind, as were all words. Brienne had lost faith long ago in the purpose of the Queen’s Tribunals, to set down unvarnished facts for the future as well as purge the guilty. 

She pulled a parchment covered in her cramped hand close, dipped her quill in ink.

“Your crimes are listed here in reverse order from how they… how you committed them,” Brienne explained, for formality rather than the Kingslayer’s sake. “You organized the forces which held King’s Landing against Her Grace.” 

He snorted, almost as elegant as a courtly laugh. “She _would_ count that as one of my crimes, wouldn’t she? Though she was not yet crowned and anointed, and had no right to the title. Our gracious sovereign is nothing if not petty. Yes, I organized the city’s defenses. Frightened boys and cripples and even a handful of women. You’d have fit right in.” 

Brienne made a note of the first confession. “In your last years as its Lord Commander, the Kingsguard became known among smallfolk as the ‘guild of torturers.’ What have you to say to that?”

The Kingslayer shrugged. “One wins wars any way one can. Or tries to, at least.” 

He smirked at Brienne’s expression. She had once thought service in a Kingsguard the highest goal to which she could aspire. This man had allowed the sworn brothers under his command to become little more than a band of finger-cutters and bone-breakers in service to a boy king too young to order such an abomination. Rumor had it that Jaime Lannister had participated often, carried out the chopping off of hands and feet himself. 

His maimed arm rested on the table between them, the sleeve pulled over the old scars. His voice intruded on Brienne’s thoughts. “I wonder what you did during the war, Conciliator Tarth?” Jaime Lannister murmured. “You look like the world was no kinder to you after your precious Renly died than it ever was to me. Maybe I should ask the guards about you, hmm?” 

An image flitted before Brienne’s mind’s eye, barely there before it vanished: Brienne saw herself stab Jaime Lannister through one of his mocking green eyes with her sharp quill. She could do it easily enough, he was maimed and weak from his imprisonment, while Brienne had kept herself strong and healthy, despite her injuries. 

She dipped her quill in the inkpot, made a note of his second confession. 

And so it went. 

The ravaging of the Riverlands? 

His armies had done it under his command. “To call what we did ‘pacification’ is fitting,” the Kingslayer said, smiling with all his teeth. “There was hardly a soul left alive to disturb the peace by the end.” 

The breaking of House Blackwood? 

They would not bend the knee, though they had lost all their allies. Lannister claimed his choice had been a simple matter of breaking them then and there or after they’d been starved out of their castle. 

The siege of Riverrun? 

He’d lifted it by throwing Edmure Tully’s newborn son over the walls with a trebuchet and ordering an assault on the castle while its defenders were in shock and disarray. The survivors had been put to the sword. 

The attempted murder of Lord Eddard Stark? 

Jaime Lannister merely smirked and added the attempted murder of Eddard Stark’s son at Winterfell to the list, as though dropping another dry leaf on a pile destined for the bonfire. 

Incest with Queen Pretender Cersei Baratheon? Fathering her children, all of whom had at one point or another been Pretenders in their own right, all long dead for their crimes? Serving them as member and later Lord Commander of the Kingsguard? 

Yes, yes, and yes. The Kingslayer insisted only that Brienne write down he had not had many chances to commit incest with Cersei Baratheon after his maiming. 

“Cersei found me more useful as a hired cutthroat thereafter,” he said, old pain lacing his words despite the effort to sound callous. He seemed unaware that his left hand was rubbing his stump, the sleeve fallen back to reveal the white ridges of ill-healed flesh.

Brienne stared at the man they called the Kingslayer. She wanted to believe this was nothing but empty arrogance, the last refuge of a man long stripped of all his pride and possessions. Yet she kept seeing glimpses of the man who had once been the flower of knighthood, become already in his youth a story to frighten unruly children. 

Brienne swallowed, mouth dry as sand. “The slaying of the rightful King Aerys of House Targaryen, the Second of His Name?”

Jaime Lannister fixed her with eyes like wildfire. “ _That_ was a simple throat-cutting. It only became a kingslaying once they came in and saw me standing over his body, which did not, you can tell your queen, have anything remotely in common with that of a dragon.” 

“Why?” 

The word was out of Brienne’s mouth before she could stop it, before she could even think it. She was there to compile a confession, not seek after reasons. 

Lannister gave her a startling look: level, assessing, honest. It only lasted a moment, then he sat back and smirked, his walls tall and thick against Brienne and the world. 

“Words are wind. What I did remains. The dead stay dead, while the maimed live. As you and I know well, wench.” 

On the morrow, Chief Conciliator Qyburn frowned at the draft of the Kingslayer’s confession. 

Brienne held her hands still by sheer force of will while Qyburn perused. She wanted the Chief Conciliator’s approval so she could write up the final draft and have it all be done. 

“He seems willing to say what he did, not why,” Qyburn murmured. 

“It is a confession,” Brienne replied stiffly. “Not a full personal history. I was not aware reasons were required.” Jaime Lannister’s words echoed in her memory. _The maimed live._

Qyburn shook his head. “You still have two meetings with the Kingslayer. A confession of crimes without reasons is worthless. It might as well be a list some kitchen wench makes come market day.” 

“You mean you want his excuses.” Brienne had never spoken to Qyburn so sharply before. He raised his brown eyes from the document and looked at Brienne. She swallowed the sudden anger like a live coal. “I do not think Lannister will give you any.” 

Qyburn nodded, looking thoughtful. He held out Brienne’s draft so she had to lean over his writing table to receive it, her leg protesting. “You must try regardless.” 

Jaime Lannister laughed in Brienne’s face, as she had expected he would. 

“I was Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, a kingslayer, and many other things you know. You and your little queen will get no apologies from me, no reasons or explanations. And you will not make me beg.”

“Your sister made a similar claim,” Brienne replied calmly. “She swore Her Grace could not make her scream. She was wrong.” 

Lannister’s grin was terrible to behold. “Everybody screams. Everybody breaks. A torturer knows these things. You and I know this, Brienne of Tarth. My sister… knew nothing. I have been practicing down in the cells, where no one can hear. I will make beautiful music when I scream for the Dragon Queen. But I will not beg.”

“It would do you no good to beg,” Brienne said. “You know this as well. Perhaps… perhaps I can offer you something in return for the truth.”

“For all the good it’s done me, I’ve only ever had one woman. I do not intend to ruin myself with you, wench.”

Brienne allowed her anger to surface. It surged up from the pit of her stomach to her cheeks, her voice. “I do not hold my body in such high regard. You asked me what I did during the war. I will tell my tale in exchange for the truth about King Aerys.”

She expected Lannister to mock her, remind her how paltry and worthless an offering her story was. 

He sat unmoving, watching her. Brienne needed several long moments to recognize Lannister’s expression: not hope. Expectation. A look rarely seen on those who knew themselves condemned. 

So she told him. 

How she had struggled and fought and strived to be accepted into Renly Baratheon’s Rainbow Guard. How she’d begged the honor of arming him before the battle at Storm’s End, been passed over in favor of Loras Tyrell. How the Knight of Flowers had murdered his king and been slain in turn by the guards. How most of Renly’s host had bent the knee to Stannis Baratheon. 

Not so Brienne: she’d run away, masterless and purposeless. For all the strength in her arm and the truth in her steel, she’d been a woman alone in times of war, prey for bands of men roaming the countryside. 

Brienne omitted how often she had barely kept rape and death at bay, told Jaime Lannister only of the period carved into her flesh: when she had been held captive at the Inn at the Crossroads, her leg broken thrice to prevent her running away, the lashes she’s received for fighting back, the broken teeth she’d swallowed. The man who’d preferred the taste of human flesh even to the uses his companions had found for Brienne’s body. How her leg had healed crooked, and she’d eventually murdered several of her tormentors with the aid of the others ( _children_ ) they’d held captive, and escaped, roaming the countryside, not quite a hedge knight, somewhat less than a woman, stealing and fighting to survive. Until the Dragon Queen had come like a storm out of the east, sowing lightning in her wake. 

Like so many others, Brienne had bent the knee and broken her sword and sworn leal service. There had not been enough of the girl who’d sailed from Tarth left in her to do elsewise. She had expected to be sent back to her father in disgrace, discovered she could still wonder at the world when the queen chose Brienne to serve as a conciliator and thus prove her loyalty. 

“I had no one and nothing to look to,” she finished, gestured vaguely at herself, the man listening intently to her tale, the windowless chamber lit by smoking torches, “and so I became this.” Brienne paused, her mind snagged on a memory. “One of the men who… I met him again, here. He was to stand trial, and I was assigned to compile his personal history. He did not recognize me. I went to his execution, and I knew. I knew then that none of this has anything to do with justice. Not where vengeance reigns supreme.”

This was dangerous talk, seditious talk, yet Brienne breathed more deeply than she had in years. She could almost feel her old self, before the Riverlands, before Storm’s End, stirring and stretching like one long enfeebled by illness and trying to rise from their sickbed.

“War makes monsters of us all,” Jaime Lannister said. The words were old and well-worn, yet kind. He meant to comfort her. _He_ meant to comfort _her_ , he who would soon lose his life like any common knave. 

Brienne’s mouth twisted, the comfort sour on her tongue. “We make monsters of ourselves. There it is: my tale. You may not have wanted it, but you know it. Now tell me about the Mad King.”

Nobody ever referred to Aerys II by that name any more, not if they intended to live in the Dragon Queen’s realm. Maybe that was what prompted Lannister to speak freely, more than any unwanted debt he owed for Brienne’s tale, more than a desire to unburden his wretched soul. 

“This will not do,” Qyburn told Brienne when she presented him with a new draft of Lannister’s confession. “King Aerys burying caches of wildfire, preparing to burn down the capital? No. None of this can remain in the final version.”

Brienne had once thought no goal futile or impossible if only she tried hard enough. Having no such faith now, she took a deep breath and tried regardless. “Her Grace should know what her father was. This is a confession, it contains reasons, it contains the truth. She should know, so she may reconcile herself to it and do better.”

For only a moment, Qyburn’s kindly visage slipped, and Brienne was graced with a glimpse of the man beneath. 

“Don’t be a fool,” Qyburn said, his voice as soft and level as ever. “Her Grace did not forgo the pleasure of making an example of the Kingslayer all this time in order to have the world learn about his wounded heart and honorable intent. ‘Conciliator’ is just a title. A word. Wind, no more. You have kept your head on your shoulders thus far, Brienne.” Qyburn thrust the document back at her. “Don’t lose it now over Jaime Lannister.” 

Brienne made no move to accept her notes from Qyburn. “He is the man we all think he is. But there is more.” 

Qyburn shook his head. “A soul is not a contagious disease. You cannot catch one through sheer proximity.”

 _You should know._ “I have one more meeting with him.”

“To what purpose? You have everything you need to compile his confession. A proper one.” 

Brienne looked Qyburn in the eye. He did not look away. She had to admit: he always managed to look everyone in the eye. 

“Lannister is the last one,” Brienne said. “The tribunals will cease after him, and I have petitioned Her Grace for permission to return to Tarth.” 

Qyburn watched her a long moment, gestured for her to take the pages out of his hand. When Brienne obeyed, he nodded, barely a dip of his chin. It was all Brienne needed and rather more than she had hoped for. 

“I did not expect to see you again, wench,” Jaime Lannister drawled in his mocking manner when they faced each other for the last time. “Don’t tell me you’ve grown so fond of me you cannot bear to have us parted. I fear your tender heart might not survive the near future, were that the case.”

Brienne nearly blushed, but she had prepared what she had to say over the long hours before dawn, after her candle had guttered and her draft lay unfinished still. 

“Listen to me, ser, because this is important, and you face your tribunal on the morrow. You know what follows thereafter. You are Ser Jaime Lannister the Kingslayer, Scourge of the Riverlands, Master of Torturers, oathbreaker and blasphemer.” 

Lannister frowned. Brienne did not pause. 

“The conciliators are not interested in could have been’s, only in what was and is. We were meant to guard the truth, and this is not the truth entire. You are also Goldenhand, Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, the Lion of Lannister, Shield of the West, brother to a queen, father to two kings, knight and protector of the realm. You should die bearing all your names. I will not set all this down, for Her Grace would never allow a full record of your deeds to endure. But I will know it. As long as I live, the truth will live with me, the truth entire. I will not forget any single part of it. This I swear to you on my honor as a woman, the heir to Tarth, and a conciliator.” 

Her words run dry, Brienne held her breath. Jaime Lannister’s face was the warm, salty breeze of her childhood, the hope she had carried in her saddlebags when first she’d gone to war, the red poppies which had bloomed on burnt fields at war and Winter’s end, before the bitter smoke had even cleared. 

“I think,” Jaime Lannister said slowly, “I think, perhaps, had we met years ago, we would be having a very different conversation now.”

 _As do I_ , Brienne thought but could not say. 

Lannister smiled, the small smile of a man who had seen and done too much to put any real conviction behind a smile. His smile closed itself around Brienne’s heart, a ball of thorns, another burden for her to carry. 

“I thank you, my lady,” he murmured. 

Brienne returned a shy smile of her own. “Farewell, ser.” 

Some small measure of right was done at Jaime Lannister’s beheading, though justice itself remained as absent as it ever was, since before the Queen’s Tribunals had begun and conciliators taken up their work. Of mercy there was none either, and as for peace, well: Brienne wished the Dragon Queen good fortune in making peace out of vengeance. The fourth head of the dragon was the one which swallowed Jaime Lannister and so many others whole. Necessary it may have been, but Brienne doubted much good would come of it. 

Brienne did not attend the last tribunal or the execution, though she heard, as did everyone in King’s Landing, of the Kingslayer’s final words of defiance. The thorns tore at her heart all the more to know Lannister had been right after all: they could not make him beg. 

As soon as the queen allowed it, Brienne packed her meager belongings and found a ship. Her dreams and hopes smoldering behind and before her, she carried with her an old, broken sword, a tattered cloak, some bits of dented, useless armor, a cracked, faded shield, her own weary and ill-used flesh, and the truth. 

The truth no one else would ever know, for Brienne had not accepted that burden in order to weigh down others with it, a weight like the whole ocean carried on her back. Yet knowing it (being the only one to really know) made Brienne’s hands and limping footsteps lighter than they had felt in years, light as the seagulls wheeling on the Spring wind, which rushed across the Narrow Sea to tangle in Brienne’s hair and fill her nostrils with brine. A wind filled with a thousand thousand whispered names.

**Author's Note:**

> The concept of contagious disease is not exactly canon appropriate, but I figured if anyone in Westeros came up with it, it would be Qyburn. I borrowed conciliators and the guild of torturers from Gene Wolfe’s _The Book of the New Sun_ , although I give those terms different meanings and context.


End file.
